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ness was at a standstill. Throngs gathered before the bulletin boards to spend hours in watching for the latest news from the front. Clerks fussed nervously over their ledgers, impatient to get out and read the latest extra. Staid bankers were seen eagerly discussing the latest development with elevator men. For a moment all considerations of business and of class were laid aside or forgotten while every man talked with the man nearest him, were he friend or stranger, Upon the one all-important topic of the hour.
But in the midst of all this excitement there were certain men who did not lose their heads ; men who saw a business opportunity in what others considered a catastrophe — and those men were the Moving Picture manufacturers. Before the first of the Belgian forts had fallen, the Moving Picture companies had their emissaries upon the spot, doing their utmost to obtain the permission of the military authorities upon either side to permit them to take battle scenes. In every capital in Europe the cameras were busily clicking as the soldiers marched thru the streets on their way to entrain for the front. In the studios in America scenario writers were hammering away at their typewriters, composing war dramas to meet the great demand which the far-sighted " movie magnate'7 knew was certain
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to arise in the near future. Office men were fumbling thru the card index, hunting for war plays which had been submitted and rejected months before. Property men were rushing about giving orders for uniforms and peasant costumes. Playwrights were besieged with offers for the Moving Picture rights of every play that had a military feature. Nothing that smacked at all of war was overlooked by the Moving Picture man, and it was not long before advertisements began to appear in the papers. This, with the exception of the address, is an actual copy of one :
FIVE HUNDRED MEN WANTED at once, for Moving Pictures; ex-soldiers or members of military organizations having discharge papers. Apply to R. T., 1128 West 1126th Street.
And this meant that the time had come to recruit the movie army and set about making battle scenes which should equal in interest any that might be taken upon the actual field of battle, and which would, in many respects, be much more artistic.
When war first broke out, the Moving Picture men were filled with a hope that their greatest opportunity had arrived and that they would be able to place before their audiences the real battles as taken at the scene of action, but it was not long before they were undeceived. They learnt